This blog is about thinking of things past, present and future in testing. As much as I'd like to see clearly, my crystal ball is quite dim. Learning is essential and this is my tool for that.
A sister blog in Finnish: http://testauskirja.blogspot.com

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Community over Technology in Open-Source

So, you have created an open source tool. Great, congratulations. I'm still planning on adding mine to the pile. But let me say something I wonder if techie people understand: *your tool is not the only tool*. And as a user of these tools, I'm feeling the weight of trying to select one that I want to even look at. I've looked at many, to find myself disappointed in something I find relevant to be missing. And yes, with an open source tool, I've heard the usual mantra that I can just change it. But forking my own version to have faster control over it creates a merge hell, so you better make sure you let things in the main repo fast enough and not leave them hanging in the pull requests queue.

There's loads of awesome open source tools, but the user challenge is no longer so much about finding some, but finding one that is worth investing your time on. Having something die out of your tool stack and replace it creates distraction. So most of us go for tools with good communities. Tech matters less than the community.

With European Testing Conference Call for Collaborations, many people who have created a tool propose a talk on that tool. A quick and simple search to github tells me there are 1,004,708 repository results for "testing" and over the two years of these 15-minute calls, I've got a small insight into maybe a hundred people creating and maintaining their own tools, wanting to share their awesomeness.

Last year we defined what kind of things we might consider, saying that it has to be either an insightful idea that anyone could relatively easily bring into their own testing frameworks or something that an open source tool supports. This year, I'm learning to add more requirements to the latter.

The open source tool is not of support if it does not have a proper community. There needs to be other users and active core group answering questions and improving the experience of getting introduced into the tool. But also, it matters now more to me how the core group deals with their project.

If I see pull requests that have been in the queue for a long time, it hints to me that the community contributions are not seen as a priority.

Building and supporting a community takes an effort. I see some projects understand that and emphasize a community that welcomes contributions, while other treat the community more as outsiders.

I'm grateful for the 15 minutes of insight into tools I would never given even that time unless I had the main contributor as my guide in the call, wanting to share on their project at one of the limited spots of the conference. For a conference, any conference not just European Testing Conference, the organizers are always working against the idea of a limited budget of spaces. and that gives an indication that out of a typical 10-20 slots in a conference, not all of these tools will ever be presented.

What are the tools that are worth the spots then? Selenium / Protractor are clearly choices of the community already. Others need to have a common problem solved in a particularly insightful way and life ahead that the community can believe in.